From the small things
of my life, from the seemingly safe, steady routines of cooking, cleaning,
keeping house for my family, teaching, yoga classes, meeting friends,
waiting for buses and trains, I receive subliminal messages from the
millions of women not so fortunate. Everyday routine is not granted
to everyone. To be safe and to know that tomorrow too will be safe is
no longer a given. I have never been caught in a war-zone; in a world
torn apart by war in this and the last century, a woman growing to middle
or old age without being subjected to the savage compulsions of war
or revolution is fortunate. And statistically one would be in a minority.
Women, for no fault of their own, are never involved in the high-level
negotiations that may precede a war, or even considered pawns in the
games men play; they become either the spoils of war, or part of the
"collateral damage". They are trapped in villages, towns and
mountainous regions that one would have trouble identifying on a map,
but which make headlines every day, because of civil war, armies going
berserk, atrocities committed by terrorists or the military, invasion
by a greedy superpower or neighbour and, of course, revolutions. And
in these terrible situations, women pay the price. Women and children.
Women and children, usually strung together when spoken as if it were
one word. Whole worlds crash as violence erupts; homes are destroyed,
children go missing, women are raped, mutilated and killed, fathers
disappear for unfathomable reasons. Perhaps the most telling leitmotif
of the last century is of a lost child crying or a woman sitting traumatised,
her face blank, as fires rage in the background. Or the long lines of
the feeble and old, women carrying small children and whatever else
they could salvage straggling up a hillside... . Eckhart Tolle, contemporary
philosopher and teacher, says that a large part of our history has all
the characteristics we would normally associate with a nightmare or
an insane hallucination.

War! A single monosyllable
like someone spitting, but it packs the impact of a jackboot descending.
In German too, "der krieg" is like a harsh expletive, in French,
"la guerre" is almost melodic, even romantic, but in whatever
language, the word, the idea of being at war, does strange things to
men; however much they may deplore the need to go to war, reasons are
always found to justify, to excuse, to glorify war. There is the charge
of adrenalin and hate, the demonisation of the enemy begins early in
the game, war games start as part of training, great reserves of animal
courage are called upon, young men flex their muscled bodies and mentally
and physically prepare to kill the other, the enemy.

But the insanity does not
end there. The human race has now become quite acclimatised to, almost
blasé about, the sight of women in uniform whether they are guerrilla
fighters or insurgents or as regular army personnel, whether in the
U.S. army, or in some Central African republic, or in the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), or in West Asia; we do not consider it
unnatural anymore that women have become warriors, that they too, in
the name of equal rights/opportunities, have become accustomed to the
act of killing, maiming, hurling grenades at the enemy, setting landmines...
.

Helene Cixous the famous
French radical feminist writer and teacher, asks the simple question,
"What is woman for man?" And, she quotes from a Chinese manual
of strategy, a handbook for the warrior, written by the general Sun
Tse. Asked to train the king's 180 wives, Sun Tse formed the women into
two lines each headed by the king's two favourite wives, then asked
them to listen to the language of the drumbeat.But the more he repeated
the order, the more the women fell about laughing, chattering and laughing.
Sun Tse decided that since they were so disobedient, he would condemn
them to death. But the king objected to losing all his 180 wives; so
Sun Tse, as an example, beheaded the two favourites at the head of the
line. He had no more trouble with the women; they performed perfectly
in silence, no more subversive laughter.

During the prolonged Vietnam war that later spilled over into Cambodia,
I recall reading a report of the effects of what was happening on Cambodian
society. The jungles were filled with young men and women insurgents
trying to outwit the enemy. The report spoke with great seriousness
of the value of women as soldiers, warriors. Their bodies are supple,
they can melt into the background with greater ease; they can pass as
peasants by carrying water, or a baby, or firewood, and carry messages
with greater ease. A woman is her body, in a way that a man can never
be. From the time she is a young girl entering puberty, her body adapts
itself to lunar cycles, to the natural processes of preparing to give
birth, to nurture and to protect. This same body, as a consequence of
the politics and ideologies of the day, is trained to the unnatural
processes of existence in the harshest of terrains, to develop the ferocity
of men who attack and who are attacked, to become immunised to pain,
to begin to think and act like men. Women who would, in normal times,
be the storehouses of family history, cultural lore, religious traditions,
teachers of songs, tellers of stories, keepers of social custom, become
instead the destroyers of all that is human and decent about the human
race.

In a recent article on women's
cadres within the LTTE, it was estimated that at least half the members
of the LTTE are women, often recruited as children. The LTTE is one
of the few rebel groups that uses women not just as human bombs but
as frontline troops fighting against a conventional army. Radhika Coomaraswamy,
the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, questions the militarisation
of women, pointing out that it flies in the face of the humanism, non-violence,
and the "celebration of life over death" that characterise
the women's movement all over the world.

But, perhaps, this is the
savage rejoinder of men to women seeking equality and empowerment, seeking
a mutuality of understanding: "You want to be equal? Come become
Us!"